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Udi Ledergor served as CMO during Gong’s rise from new SaaS startup to industry dominance. By building a playful, human-centric brand with a lighthearted tone, he captured buyers’ attention and dollars and turned them into raving fans. He helped Gong go from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue, while achieving a multi-billion-dollar valuation. His book Courageous Marketing is officially out and you can buy it below in the show notes.
Discussed in this Episode:
- Why Marketing ‘Best Practices’ are broken for Brands that want to stand out.
- Marketers need to consider the long game and remember the 95/5 rule.
- When you should hire for experience versus potential.
- How to foster a culture of healthy risk-taking with your team.
If you missed GTM 141, check it out here: Timeless Growth Tips From a $7.4B Oracle Exit and Scaling Carta to $450M in Revenue | Jeff Perry
Highlights:
04:09 Udi’s inspiration for writing his new book, Courageous Marketing.
06:02 The four most common reasons why marketing fails.
09:22 What marketers should be looking for when selecting a company to join.
13:55 The Problem with ‘playing it safe’ in B2B marketing.
23:07 How to market to both the 5% and the 95% of your buyers.
38:13 The Three Team Operating Principles for leading a bold and effective marketing team.
Guest Speaker Links (Udi Ledergor):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/udiledergor
- Gong: https://www.gong.io/
- Udi’s Book, Courageous Marketing: https://mybook.to/courageousmarketing
Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
- Newsletter: https://gtmnow.com/tag/newsletter/
Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):
- Website:https://gtmnow.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
- Twitter/X:https://x.com/GTMnow
- YouTube: / @gtm_now
- The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Sponsor: ZoomInfo’s GTM25 Virtual Conference—a free, half-day event on how high-performing teams are using AI and GTM Intelligence to hit revenue goals faster.
May 7th | Virtual | Free.
GTM 142 Episode Transcript
Udi Ledergor:Just focus on building a great product people love. Everything else is secondary, and I’m putting marketing in that secondary bowl.
You need to understand who your aUdience is and what value the company, the product, and the service provide.
You are fighting against the sea of sameness. So many startups are saying the exact same thing, and they’re gonna help with their productivity and they’ve got AI slapped over everything.
different is better than better in most situations like this because by being different, you’re now playing in your own category on your own field, and you can stand out much faster.
by the time anything becomes a best practice, everyone’s doing it. And by doing it, you will get ordinary results like everyone else. So I think playing it safe is the riskiest strategy of all, both in product and in marketing. I refuse to accept the reality that any field is boring, everything can be made exciting.
The best decision you can make is hire for potential over experience.
Sophie Bounassisi: Hello and welcome to the GTM podcast. Thank you for lending us your eardrums for the next 60 minutes. This is Sophie Bounassisi, VP of Marketing at GTM Fund and our media brand GTM. Now I am honored and excited to join the GTM podcast today as a host for a special marketing episode.
I’m joined by Udi Ledor. Udi, welcome to the podcast.
Udi Ledergor: Thank you so much for having me, Sophie. I think it’s my third time back and you’re not sick of me yet. That’s incredible.
Sophie Bounassisi: Can never get you my friend. I think that’s actually setting a new record. Well, while I feel like you need no introduction, we’ve had a lot of new listeners lately and always like to do one anyways, so, you know, do a, a quick bio for the listeners, but Udi Ledor served as CMO during gong’s rise from new SaaS startup to industry dominance.
By building a playful human-centric brand with a lighthearted tone. He captured buyer’s attention and dollars and turned them into raving fans. He helped go from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue while achieving a multi-billion dollar valuation Over his 20 year career, Udi has led marketing teams at successful companies, advised startups, served as a board member, an angel investor, and mentored hundreds of marketers.
His work reveals how courage and creativity can build iconic brands, connect with audiences, and drive measurable results. And now he can add authors to his incredible career. His book, courageous Marketing, is officially out and you can buy it in the show notes. We’ll pop it in the show notes.
Udi Ledergor: thank you very much. Yes, it’s out on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles and wherever you go, buy your books. Look for courageous marketing.
Sophie Bounassisi: Amazing. And do you have it on hand? Let’s see the cover for everyone listening on YouTube.
Udi Ledergor: go.
Sophie Bounassisi: There it is.
Udi Ledergor: Courageous Mark.
Sophie Bounassisi: I love it. Well, I was fortunate enough to get to dig into the book before it was published. Very honored. And we have a lot to unpack. Love to unpack some of the themes behind it. But before we get into it,
Udi’s inspiration for writing his new book, Courageous Marketing
Sophie Bounassisi: How and when did you decide to write and publish a book?
Udi Ledergor: You know, Sophie, I’ve been doing B2B marketing for 20 years now, and I always set aside a couple of hours a week, even during my busiest times as CMO to mentor up and coming marketers, early career entrepreneurs, first time founders who are looking to learn how to take the boring out of B2B marketing.
And on the one hand I was happy that I’m making an impact. On the other hand, it never felt enough to me ’cause. I know there’s so many messages in my inboxes on email, on LinkedIn for people who want more time with me, and I teach CMO school classes and I do whatever I can, but I, I wanted to scale that like you would scale a SaaS company.
And then two years ago when I transitioned from my role as gong’s CMO to Gong’s chief evangelist, I finally had a little more flexibility in my time and that’s when I decided would be the perfect time to sit down. Put the ink to paper on all these lessons that I’d accumulated in the last 20 years, not just mine, but also some of the best CMOs in the industry, along with some of the best marketing team members that I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the last eight years at Gong.
And all those stories, all those lessons, all those experiences made their way into the book which I’m so excited is finally out. And really the goal is just to reach as many marketers, entrepreneurs, founders, who want to learn about taking the boring out of B2B marketing.
Sophie Bounassisi: Incredible impact on their distribution at scale.
Udi Ledergor: Yes.
Sophie Bounassisi: Well, let’s dig into it. And we all wanna know the playbooks for what works, but because marketing is such an interesting blend of art and science, of branded demand, qual and quant, sometimes the real clarity comes from studying what doesn’t work. So let’s flip it, and that was one thing that really stood out to me in the book was that you did flip it and you’ve seen hundreds of campaigns and teams and actions.
The four most common reasons that marketing fails
Sophie Bounassisi: What are the most common ways that marketing falls flat? Why does it fail when it fails?
Udi Ledergor: So talking to all these CMOs and looking at my own experiences and companies that I didn’t do well at, I think I’ve uncovered four less talked about reasons why marketing and marketers fail. The first one, the first one is. This is a tricky one because. It’s something that we as marketers need to look for before we join a company. Often, and this happens in very early stage, companies can also happen in later stage companies when a company’s lost touch with their market and maybe have fallen outta product market fit. But more commonly you’ll find this in early stage startups where there’s very excited founders and they’re sure they’re gonna change the world.
They bring in marketing too early before there’s any sliver of product market fit. And then what usually plays out is that the marketer says, okay, what do you need me to do? And the founder said, well, get us lots of leads and lots of meetings and we’ll, we’ll sell to them. Like us, we can pitch our product when they get to the meeting, but then the marketer tries bringing an audience.
But to do that, you need to understand who your audience is and what value the company, the product, and the service provide. And if that story isn’t even in its most nascent form, and the marketer can help create that story, if in layman’s term you could describe what the product does for whom, but if that doesn’t exist, and if the beta customers or the design partners are not seeing the value and can’t articulate.
How they’re getting value from the product. The marketer usually can’t save the situation, and I’ve been in that position and every time I ask a roof of marketers who’s been in that position, everyone kind of shyly raises their hand. We’ve all fallen for that trap, and there are many reasons why we join a company.
It could be because their product seems cool. It could be something I’ve heard of. It could be something. Sometimes people just need a job and that’s okay, and they join the first offer that they get, but then they’re faced with this harsh reality of, I can’t explain this. Value of this product to a buyer.
Nobody understands what we do. Nobody’s seeing the value. So there’s no customer success stories to share with an aUdience, and eventually marketing is pegged as a failure because you didn’t bring those leads, you didn’t create that pipeline. Well, how could I? There’s nothing to create a pipeline around.
There is no value that is repeatable. We don’t have a tight ICP that I can go and scale that marketing. ’cause most marketing, especially on a budget, needs a very tight ICP. Like I can go bring a hundred more lookalikes if I know who we’re selling to. But if the founders don’t even know that because they say, oh, we can sell to this industry and that industry.
We can sell to large companies and small companies. Oh, but you have 50 k of marketing budget. I can’t address all those audiences. I can’t explain what. So that I think is, is one really gotcha reason to look out for, and in the book I explain how marketers can do some due diligence before they join a company, just like they get reference checks before they get an offer.
Marketers, the savvy ones, absolutely do a reference check and do due diligence on a company and on the CEO to understand what stage of product marketing they’re really in.
What marketers should be looking for when selecting a company to join
Sophie Bounassisi: Makes sense. And what advice then would you give to marketers that are doing that due diligence and, and looking for a company to join. Because what we find from the venture lens is earlier and earlier, do companies want that marketing function to start building brand ahead of time to start just overall building the content flywheel too.
And they might not have perfect product market fit yet.
Udi Ledergor: Right. So, I’d say there’s a few flavors that this can take and, I’ll give you a few ideas. It’s not an exhaustive list, but here are some things I’ve actually done. So there’s a company that wants me to join as a board member. An their ICP was CMOs just like me. So the first thing I asked the CEO of the company, I told her I want one of your salespeople to call me.
Sell me your product. I want to go through your entire sales process. I wanted to see if it made sense to me, and she had one of her top salespeople call me and the salesperson walked me through some discovery and walked me through the value that the product could add, and I had a much deeper understanding of the product and it actually made sense to me.
So that was a big green check mark for me as I move forward in that process to evaluate whether I understand the value prop of this product. Does it make any sense to someone like me? Now, many times you’re gonna join the company, but the company is not selling to your buyer persona. They could be selling to sales or finance or it.
So you can’t really do that unless you feel that you’re savvy enough in that domain. What I would do in that case, I would go talk to some of my friends in that domain and have them look at the website and say, Hey, does this make sense to you? Have you tried this product? Do you know anyone who uses it?
Would you use it? Does it make sense what it says there? Go to G two. Check out their customer reviews. If they already have even a handful of customers, they should have a few reviews there. Go to Glassdoor. Look at what employees are writing about the experience of working there. One of the first things that employees will write, if they have to leave and exit the company early because of lack of market fit, they will write that on G two.
That will say, the product doesn’t work. Nobody gets what we do. You’ll find those telltale signs. So there’s lots of footprints you can find for problems like this.
Sophie Bounassisi: Makes sense. And what about founders? Because like I mentioned, we often get founding teams wanting to bring in marketing earlier and earlier and they. Most certainly don’t have product market fit at that stage. Is it a mistake to bring marketing in that early or how should they be thinking about marketing so it doesn’t get to that failure point where marketing is viewed as, kind of a failing function, if you will, within the greater ecosystem and more as an experimentation partner and finding product market fit.
Udi Ledergor: So I’d say two things to the founders. First, I’d repeat a great piece of advice from Sam Altman,founder of OpenAI. But he gave this advice back in his YC days and he said, just focus on building a great product people love. Everything else is secondary, and I’m putting marketing in that secondary bowl.
After product, marketing cannot fix the product for long or cannot cover for a, for a lack of product market fit. So if you are strapped for resources, you’re only a couple of people absolutely focused on building a product people love, go door to door and sell it to five and then 10 people who love using it and will tell other people that they love using it.
That should be your focus area. Now the second thing I would say is. Here’s where you need to understand what marketers can and cannot do. Most marketers can come in and once you can show them, these are five customers, here’s why they love our product, here’s how they use their product. Here’s what they all have in common.
Now go get 20 more or 50 more, or a hundred more like this that we can go talk to. That’s what a good marketer can do. You need a very exceptional marketer to come in sooner than that, and before you understand who your ICP is, what value you’re creating, help you craft that story. And that story also becomes the product strategy.
That is a very, very early stage. And if you’re okay with doing that, if you need a thought partner on achieving that product market fit, you might find someone who is a marketer with a background in engineering, they can help you do most in the market. Blow up demand gen and bring you a hundred leads. They can’t do that.
They can’t do that unless you have some initial market fit where you can say, this is my SCP, this is how we provide them value.
Sophie Bounassisi: Yeah, so the message is nice and clear. Find that ICP, create a repeatable, scalable motion around it, that brings us to our second point.
The Problem with ‘playing it safe’ in B2B marketing
Udi Ledergor: So I think the other one which I’ll give, maybe an example of a flavor or two is, is simply playing it safe. So here’s the thing. We all know from our personal lives that we notice ad campaigns from the thousands that we’re bombarded with every day. We notice the ones that really stand out.
They do something bold that do something different that might do something controversial. Some people might hate it. Some people might go like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe they did that, but that’s. That’s the campaign that we’re talking about. Those are the edgy ones, I would even say the courageous ones.
Now, the problem is we all realize that those are the only ones we’re gonna notice and the only ones we’re gonna talk about, but we rarely create them ourselves. Now, some people think it’s because they don’t have the creativity. I don’t think that’s the big reason. I think we all have some level of creativity, some more than others, and you could bring in more people with creativity.
I think that’s what most marketers do. Haven’t found the courage either because they don’t feel it would be well received in their environment or because the environment, in this case, the founder in an early stage startup hasn’t provided that psychological safety for all their team members to be courageous and do something that’s edgy and different.
And here’s what I mean, whether you’re creating content or creating a visual identity, or creating your tone of voice. You are fighting against the sea of sameness. So many startups are saying the exact same thing, and you know they’re gonna help with their productivity and they’ve got AI slapped over everything.
How can you be different? You can’t be different by playing the game that everyone’s playing and trying to be better than everyone. Here’s why, because you need to be 20 times better than everyone. You need to be the open AI of your field to get noticed, and that’s extremely hard to do easier. To decide that you’re gonna be different.
So different is better than better in most situations like this because by being different, you’re now playing in your own category on your own field, and you can stand out much faster. But to do that, you’ve gotta break away from all the so-called best practices that in reality are just boring practices.
Because by the time anything becomes a best practice, everyone’s doing it. And by doing it, you will get ordinary results like everyone else. So I think playing it safe is the riskiest strategy of all, both in product and in marketing and in business probably, and what you’re fighting against it or what you should be worried about fighting against is not a few haters.
If you do something that’s a little too edgy or not, everyone gets, that’s fantastic because now you’re creating a conversation. What you should be scared about, terrified of is indifference because that is the enemy of getting noticed. And if you do something that’s so agreeable because you follow best practices and you choose the same colors as everyone else, and you’re giving the same tips and you are agreeing with all the common knowledge in the field, you’re transparent, you’re invisible.
Nobody’s gonna notice you because you’re so agreeable, you’re probably not getting anyone excited either. So playing it safe is the riskiest strategy of all.
Sophie Bounassisi: It reminds me of the quote by Seth Godin. I think it’s just safe, risky, simple.
Udi Ledergor: Yes, a hundred percent. He writes about this in, in Purple Cow. Of course, that’s a great example worth repeating for those who don’t know it. He said, if you’re driving down the road in the countryside and you see black, white, and brown cows, you’re not gonna stop, take a photo and go tell all your friends about it.
But if you saw Purple Cow, you’d absolutely take a photo and go tell all your friends about it. Right. You wanna be the purple cow? If, if you’re not doing something that makes you the purple cow, guess what? You’re another black and white cow. Like, you’re uninteresting, you’re unnoticeable, you’re just transparent.
You’re one of many.
Sophie Bounassisi: Super interesting. And what, what kind of advice would you give to companies that are maybe in a, for lack of a better word, like an unsexy vertical that typically don’t show a lot of emotion and, you know, a lot of brilliant marketers are coming in and they. They don’t wanna play it safe. They wanna create these unforgettable campaigns, but they’re operating in a space that they feel like is more traditional, like customs brokers, for example, just to, to name one for instance.
Udi Ledergor: So, you know, I hear that a lot. People come to me and say, oh, Udi, well it was easy for you. You worked at a company so sexy like gong. I’m like, do you really think call recording was sexy in 2016 when I came in? Honestly. You think that was sexy? Come on. I’ve done marketing that stood out for companies that do ERP upgrade automation and what started as call recording and is now the very sexy field of revenue ai.
And I give examples in, in the book from other industries who remember. A few years, quite a few years ago now, there was this blender company that wanted to sell blenders and they were blending just like any other blenders and they came up with this amazingly viral campaign called Will It Blend, where they were testing things and doing this kind of science lab, crazy scientists.
YouTube videos of blending iPhones and iPads and other devices to see if they would blend. And people used to tune in and subscribe to see what’s the next crazy thing they’re gonna blend. So they turned blenders into something exciting. And we see companies do this with the most seemingly boring fields.
I refuse to accept the reality that any field is boring, everything can be made exciting. Here’s one example. I give in the book. You know how in January, most companies have to send out a privacy policy email where they say, Hey Sophie, we need to let you know that we updated our privacy policy.
Here’s the new version of it. It’s not a very exciting email. Some would argue it’s the most boring email that we have. When my team had to send that out, one year, they came to me and they said, I think it was Devin at the time, he said, Udi, what, what do we do? This is like the most boring content in the world.
I’m almost embarrassed to send it out. And I said, well, don’t make it boring. And they took that brief and they said, okay, Udi thinks there’s a way of not making this boring. Let’s make this not boring. And they did. They make it fantastic. What they did is they chose a very provocative subject line that they thought would get a lot of people to open it.
So instead of becoming the least open email of the year, they got a 39.5% open rate. That’s an almost 40% open rate. You know what subject line they used? They used our lawyers, made us send this.
Sophie Bounassisi: Incredible.
Udi Ledergor: So that scared Jesus out of everyone who received it. So now with a shaking hand, they opened up the email.
That is the actual, I include a screenshot of the mail in the book so you can go see it. So our lawyers made us send this. That definitely got people to open it up. And then in the first line, we already relieved the tension and cracked a joke about it. We did put a link to the privacy policy to meet all our legal requirements.
We ended with a fun Britney Spears meme going like check and check, and people loved that so much because we took what was otherwise a completely boring, mundane moment, and we made it into something that made them crack a smile in the middle of their workday. And people took screenshots and put it up on Twitter and on LinkedIn, and one lady wrote an entire blog post about it.
That’s kind of been memorialized as, as the best privacy policy email that most people have seen. And so if that doesn’t convince you that nothing has to be boring, I don’t know what will
Sophie Bounassisi: I don’t know what would either. That’s a perfect example. So four Reasons Marketing fails. We’ve got a lack of product market fit, playing it too safe.
Udi Ledergor: playing it safe. The third one is really a flavor of playing it safe, which is death by committee. A famous British author said, I’ve searched all the parks and I haven’t found any statues of committees.
And the reason he hasn’t found any statues of committees is that there are none. As far as I know of, maybe, maybe listeners can send some in if they find them. Usually you see a single person, a man or a woman, sometimes on a horse that they did something great and noble and bold and brave, and they get a statue.
But committees don’t. You know why? Because they drift. To mediocre, they drift to a consensus, which is usually a little bit of making her happy and making him happy and making them happy, and you end up with something that nobody’s excited about anymore. And so when you’re trying to create some kick ass campaign, like a visual identity or a slogan for an ad, the worst thing you can do is get 20 random people in the room and ask everyone what they wanna see in it, because you’ll get this ridiculous hodgepodge that’s maybe going to please everyone, but it’s not gonna excite. In the book, I talk about how to manage decision making like this with the smallest team possible. How to manage expectations of people that you do ask for their feedback. Ensuring that they understand that while you’re going to consider their feedback, you’re not guaranteeing that it’s gonna make it into the final product.
And setting up these expectations is really important for leaving room to make a bold, sharp point of view for the final product of that committee work.
Sophie Bounassisi: I love it. I used to run a lot of experimentation and it was so interesting to see the copy and messaging that would come from committees versus individuals. And at the end of the day, if you think about it, you are testing, so why not go for the bold one? And I will say most times it was the bold, differentiated one, not the committee one that actually went out as high as performance.
How to market to both the 5% and the 95% of your buyers
Udi Ledergor: And then the fourth and last reason, which is kind of a big one. Marketing fails is what’s known as the 95 5 rule, or in this case, my angle is ignoring the long game. So what happens is, by now most marketers have heard about the 95 5 rules. For those who haven’t heard about it, I’ll give a ten second version.
It came out of the LinkedIn Research Institute where they found that at any given moment, only about 5% of your target market is in the market to buy a solution like yours. And most marketers would say, yeah, that makes sense. I could go into the background, which I do into the book, but I’ll, I’ll skip it here for sake of time.
Once you accept the reality that only about 5%, it could be 7% or 10%, pick a number that you’re comfortable with, but it’s a small minority of the market are in the buying zone right now. What that dictates is that you almost need two different marketing plans. One for the 95% and one for the 5%. Now everyone understands the marketing plan for the 5% ’cause they act like everyone’s in that 5%, which means.
They’re putting product information out there, case stUdies, special sale for the end of the year, two for the price of one. All of that is speaking to the 5% who are in the buying zone right now. So they will respond to that, which is good news. The problem is that you are alienating the 95% who are not in the market right now, because not only are you not getting through to them with your message because they’re just not in the zone.
And I’ll give you an example in a second. They’re also unsubscribing and unfollowing you because now you’re harassing them with irrelevant messages. They don’t want any more of that. And so when they are in the zone, maybe in six or 12 or 18 months, you can’t communicate with them because you lost them by bombarding them with your sales messages.
And I’ll give you a quick example, not from B2B, but from your day-to-day life. Let’s say you’re looking to buy a new car this quarter. So you’re researching some of the top manufacturers. You’re going to the car review sites, you’re watching YouTube videos. At least that’s what I did. I looked at the different specs on the websites, like how much storage do I have?
I’ve got a big family. How much storage do I have? I needed a seven seater. How easy is it to fold the seats and can I add an eight seed and all this stuff? I read all this and I finally bought a car. Now, right after I bought the car, the last thing I cared about was going to more car manufacturer websites.
- I was not going into car comparisons and buyer’s guides. I didn’t wanna watch any more of the YouTube channels. Now guess what? Those car manufacturers who kept bombarding me with their sales messages, I tuned out. I unsubscribed, I unfollowed. ’cause I don’t want that messaging anymore. I’m going to be happy with my car.
I’m gonna make myself happy with my car for at least the next two to three years. So why would I want to continue reading their sales messaging? And that’s exactly what’s happening to your B2B buyers. If they are not in the zone right now, if they just bought a competitor for the next year, they’re stuck with them, or maybe they signed a two or three year deal deal, they’re stuck with them. What you can do is create a content marketing program for the 95% that provides them with value unrelated to using your product. And by doing that, you create memory links so that in 18 months when they are in the zone, you are the first brand that they think of. And that logic escapes a lot of, definitely founders who don’t understand how marketing works, but even marketers tend to forget that if they’re put in an environment where there’s lots of pressure on bringing leads that are qualified now and they neglect nurturing those 95% and then you don’t get them when they are ready,
Sophie Bounassisi: No, it makes sense. And I mean, it’s also something that requires tremendous buy-in
Udi Ledergor: course, because you’re not gonna see short term returns. You’re not gonna see short term returns if you measure them by qualified leads. You can measure early indicators of success the way we did at Gong when we created the Gong Labs content series. We saw people virally sharing our content. They weren’t buying yet.
But they were sharing the content, showing that we’re hitting a nerve, we’re creating value, and they started creating a groundswell around gong. And I can’t tell you how many people came to us later and bought the product and said, you know, I’ve been getting value from your content for the last two or three years, and only now I’m finally in a managerial position where I have authority and budget to go buy our software.
But thanks to all the value you’ve provided, I’ve been reading your newsletters, I’ve been sharing them with my team. I’ve been coming to your events, listening to your content, your podcast, your webinars. I knew where to go when I needed revenue intelligence, and that’s what you want to create. You have to nurture those folks that are now in the 95% and might be in the 5% next quarter or next year.
Sophie Bounassisi: I always play the game. I love the term memory links that you use too. That’s a really good term.
Now, Udi, you’ve built out. I mean tremendous, tremendous marketing teams at Gong. And I’d love just overall to hear some of your perspective from building effective marketing teams. Like what do you look for, when do you hire, what kind of advice can other marketers and other founders and go to market leaders take around building effective teams?
Udi Ledergor: I love that topic. ’cause you know, when I sat down to write the book, it was clear to me, I’m gonna write a chapter about content marketing and one about event marketing and one about category building. ’cause those are some of the things and brand marketing, those are things that I’m kind of famous for my team at Gong’s Famous for, but.
Prior to sitting down writing the book, I almost never got a chance to talk about how to navigate your own career, how to create your next role, how to build a courageous team, and how to align with sales. And so the final four chapters of my book talk about all those things, which I think people are gonna find really exciting.
Some early readers have read that part and said, Udi, that should become its own book. Like there’s so much. Experience and, and, and nuggets in there that a lot of people can use. Because when we talk about marketing, we do think first about content and brand and that sort of thing, but we don’t really think about what kind of people do I bring in and how do I create an environment and a culture where they can do their best work.
So maybe I’ll talk about two things in that context. And listen to the rest of. I tell a story in the book about how Vince Chan was working on his cousin’s Filipino food truck in San Francisco, for those from the Bay Area. You might know Senor Sisig, they make the best California burrito. It’s fantastic.
Yes. And Vince was working on his cousin’s truck when he got a call from Russell, Russell Banon, who was working on my team at Gong. Russell asked Vince, hey, we’re throwing this event in three months. We need an intern to come help with some social media stuff and speaker prep stuff. Can you come help?
And Vince said, yeah, I’d love, I’d love to do that. Vince had no experience in tech, no experience in marketing. The reason he and Russell even knew each other is because they both danced for the same hiphop company. That’s a fun side story. And yeah, they’re both phenomenal. Dancer. I’ve been to several of their shows. Vince joins the team as an intern, which doesn’t even require a formal kind of interview process or anything ’cause we needed some, some stage hands to come help, put on our big, our first big event, celebrate back in 2019. Vince joined us in about July and we put on the event in October and.
He was so helpful and he earned everyone’s trust and love throughout those three months, and he pulled off everything he was asked to do the best way possible that after the event, Russell came to me and said, what do you think of making Vince a full-time employee? We have an opening for managing our social media.
It was the first time we were breaking off that role from the bigger content marketing role. People find this surprising until 19. Dedicated to managing social media and we were doing pretty well. So I said, yeah, I think Vince is such a fast learner and he’s shown that he will do whatever he takes.
He’ll roll up his sleeves and he can learn how to do anything. And he puts his ego aside. So when he has questions and he doesn’t know how to do something, he’ll either figure it out or come ask. Let’s give this a try. And so we went through kind of a very quick interview process and Vince joined and we’re now six years later.
Vince is still at the company doing very well on marketing operations, and he built our merchandise store and he managed social media for many years, and he’s still the go-to person for so many things on the marketing team. And the lesson from that story is that in many, many cases, the best decision you can make is to hire for potential over-experience.
Now, not every role and every opportunity is right for that. If I needed brain surgery, I probably wouldn’t go to a random guy and give them their first opportunity to do that. I’d want someone who’s been doing that for a very long time. But the good news is in marketing, the stakes are relatively lower than that, they’re rarely that high.
For a lot of roles, like I’ve hired first timers in tech and in marketing for my events team, for my content team, for my social media team, for a bunch of other roles. I think people obsess too much about it. I want someone who’s done this 10 times. Well, guess what? If you get someone who’s done it 10 times a, it makes me wonder, why have they not been promoted?
Why have they done this 10 times? Why have they not moved on? Are they not ambitious enough? Are they not good enough at doing that? And two, I’m afraid that they’re too locked into the best practices, which as I call ’em before, are in reality, boring practices. So you can inject a lot of energy into your team.
A lot of. Fresh point of views. If you bring in people who’ve never done this before, but are fast thinkers, they get shit done. Not to mention the huge opportunity that you give these people by giving them a break into a new industry, into a new profession. So that’s one huge learning that I use as often as I can.
And I just love seeing these people thrive and get promoted.
Sophie Bounassisi: Oh, that’s fantastic. I love it. I feel like the hardest part would be identifying, but if you’ve had some kind of relation before, like dancing or any kind of activity, then you get a sense for somebody’s character and overall passion in life
Udi Ledergor: Many times it’s someone who’s already working for your company, but in a completely different role. I did this several times. I’ll, I’ll maybe give you a couple of quick other stories. So, Danny Hu, I hired him first as an SDR. It was his first job in tech. His last job was selling merchandise on rock band tours.
He was touring with Panic At The Disco and other rock bands. Setting up those merchandise booths that you see. He was a very good SDR. And then he moved on. He wanted to apply for our events manager role. So this was the first time we opened a full-time events manager role.
And I got candidates coming in from companies like Airbnb and Meta and others and like people with lots of experience running tens of millions of dollars worth of events. And then Danny came in and he already knew our ICP. He knew our product, he knew our company ’cause he was an SDR for maybe 18 or 24 months.
He also had this really unique experience from show business, so he knew how to create an experience for people at events because you’ve, you’ve really gotta stand out to get people to buy merchandise at a packed rock concert. And we had a really good gut feeling around Danny that he would figure this out and do us proud and do things differently for B2B events.
We didn’t wanna look like everyone else’s B2B events. And Danny came in and for a few good years. Some work on the team. I remember we were sponsoring some event and
stand. We noticed that on our website at the time, we had part of our branding with these cool kinds of bubble effects On the homepage, you could kind of click the bubbles and they, they popped. It was a fun little game and Danny had the great idea of what if we brought bubble machines to the booth?
That’ll bring in the crowds. We’d be the only booth with bubbles floating there, and people will make the connection Oh, that’s like on your website. That’s so cool. And, and we did that. And he knew a guy and within an hour showed up with two bubble machines. And, and we made that happen. We didn’t have to pay for the carpet cleaning at the end of the show because of all the suds.
But it was, it was an awesome idea. And when we did. He brought in the smoke machines and the lighting and, and the effects that we needed because that was his world in, in touring with rock bands. And I wouldn’t get that from a regular corporate marketer who knows how to put on a kind of dignified B2B event.
So that’s how I got that angle there. And then the last example I’ll give is from Devin Reed, which most people know, from his time at Gong running our content team and, and expanding the Gong Labs. So Devin was a salesperson. He had never held a marketing job before he was working in sales.
He was a mid-market AE at Gong, doing well, and he wanted to transition to marketing. So he came to me and Chris Orlob, who was running content at the time, and he was looking for. Nighttime projects he could help with. So he helped Chris do some writing and some editing. And at some point Devin heard that we’re doing this conference, and he said he caught me in the reception area of the office.
I remember that talk to this day. He said, Udi, I heard we’re putting on a conference. Have you picked out an MC yet? If not, I’d like to nominate myself. I said, Devin, you got the job. ’cause at that point I knew Devin from his volunteering to help with marketing. I thought he would do a good job MCing the event, and he did.
He did a fantastic job and shortly after that, he made a full-time transition to marketing and ended up heading up and growing the content team for three years at Gong, creating a name for himself and for Gong. So all of those are examples of hiring for potential over experience. I should not have hired any of these people if I were looking for a specific experience, and I’m very, very glad that I did.
Sophie Bounassisi: That’s a great perspective. Yeah. Hire for potential over experience. Don’t be afraid to look internally at other functions and then also look externally at untraditional areas. Now you enabled a lot of these bold types of experiments, you know, the smoke machines and the bubbles, and you were bought into this kind of non boring marketing style.
How can companies create that kind of environment to enable marketers to feel safe making these big bets and making these bold kinds of campaigns?
The Three Team Operating Principles for leading a bold and effective marketing team.
Udi Ledergor: So I was asking myself the same question, kind of, it’s one of those things like how we can walk and chew gum and breathe at the same time, but we can’t really explain how we do it. And that’s what it felt like at the time when we were doing all this great stuff. But when I sat down to write the book, I knew I had to be a little more prescriptive.
I couldn’t just tell folks, well, just, you know, tell ’em to take risks. That’s not gonna be enough. And so. I interviewed half a dozen of my team members to really understand what the experience was from their end and what made them feel safe to go and do these things. And as I was talking to all these people, there were three themes that emerged, which I ended up tagging as.
Team operating principles, that my team used, that I, I do provide a pretty prescriptive description of in, in the book for those who wanna, replicate that sort of environment. So I’ll, I’ll rattle them off and maybe say just a few sentences on, on each of these. So the first one is fostering a culture of healthy risk taking.
And I think the, the most concise way of. Describing it is if I can steal from Adam Grant’s book, think again. He talks about research that was done on teams at NASA and at other organizations, and they found that the best performing teams shared two almost contradicting traits. One, they were giving the psychological safety of taking risks, making dangerous bets, doing experiments, trials and errors.
And you’ve gotta encourage that. You’ve gotta encourage that and you’ve gotta make them feel that you expect them to do that. That you don’t want just the average. You’re not gonna settle for mediocre, you’re not gonna settle for best practices. Like what are you doing above and beyond that? What haven’t we tried yet?
How can we go bigger? How can we 10 x that, challenge them with that and at the same time make them feel safe to do so? So you need, just like when your child is learning how to walk, you. Baby proofing the house and getting sharp objects and the fragile objects out of their reach. That’s what you’ve gotta do for your team to create an environment so they can fail safely.
And that means that inevitably, a lot of the experiments are gonna fail because that’s what happens when you’re experimenting. You’ve gotta celebrate that. Kudos on trying that. Tell us what you learned from that so we don’t have to repeat that mistake next time and what’s the next exciting thing you’re gonna try.
And by building people up to try those things. Feel safe that a failure actually becomes a learning, and we now move on with credibility to doing our next experiment. That creates a psychological safety and to couple that with what Adam Grant calls in his book process accountability, which sounds a little bit dry, but what he means by that is that we do have, we’re not doing this for the fun or the art.
There is a process. We are accountable to it. We have KPIs. We know what the North Star is, so we’re not just. Doing what a lot of marketers call random acts of marketing. Okay? It’s not all random. We’re doing experiments, but they are targeted into a thesis that if this succeeds, here’s how it will help the business.
And I’m committed to that process and I’m committed to reporting on the results. And if this doesn’t work, I’ll put it aside. I’ll document my learnings, I’ll move on to the next thing. By combining these two things, the psychological safety of taking risks and process accountability, you get the absolute best results for your team.
So that’s, that’s the first one which is fostering a culture of healthy risk taking. The second one is staying involved without micromanaging, and I repeatedly heard this from my team members and my indirect reports, where they knew that their entire leadership team in marketing, inclUding myself as the c. We were experts on our crafts. They could come to us with anything as mundane as a subject line for an email or a strategy for our next event or a campaign, and we were always happy to roll up our sleeves and get involved. In fact, that’s the one thing that I missed the most. As my team grew, they needed me less and less, and I missed being involved in doing actual marketing versus, all the overhead stuff of, of meetings.
Sophie Bounassisi: definitely being in the trenches.
Udi Ledergor: and that’s a delicate balance that every manager and leader needs to find. How do you show them that you’re there to help without hovering over their shoulder all day? And making them feel like they’re being micromanaged. So give them the distance, like tell them the what, but let them figure out the how, but also let them know that you’re always there.
If they wanna run a draft by you, they wanna show you half-baked work, which is something. I’ve noticed there’s a problem in many organizations where someone goes off on a task and they feel that they can’t come back unless they have something perfectly polished. By then, they could have gone too far down the wrong track, and you want to coach them to come to you early and share half baked work so you can verify with them that yes, you’re going down the right track until they have the confidence to do that.
And that takes time and work and, and creating again, that psychological safety of saying. I’m on your side, like show me the half-baked work. I’m not judging you as if this is finished work. I just wanna make sure we’re on the right track. Because if you’re not, I wanna know early so we can get you on the right track and then go down there and come back with the finished work.
And so staying involved without micromanaging, that’s the second one and the third one. Which I again heard from my team was we always kept it simple. The strategy needs to be simple so that everyone understands it. From the social media coordinator to the CMO to to sales and finance. When we need to go explain it to them, it has to be simple.
Like we can’t take 20 minutes to explain the strategy. Strategy has to be super simple. We’re going to these channels. We’re going to these events, we’re gonna create these leads, they’re gonna become these opportunities. That’s how they turn to revenue. And then let us worry about the tactics. The tactic can be complex, but the strategy needs to be super simple to explain, which means we’re not trying to do too many things at the same time.
We just keep it simple. And I think we forget that sometimes when we feel that we need to get overly sophisticated and then it becomes hard to explain and. We lose alignment ’cause not everyone understands what our North Star is.
Sophie Bounassisi: Super helpful. Keep it simple. I love it. Well, Udi, this has been fabulous. I’d love to transition to a question that we actually got from one of our founders within the founder networks. We actually poll and get a better sense for what kind of questions would be helpful. And this one actually comes as no surprise because I think Gong and yourself did this incredibly well.
It’s how I think about differentiation between myself and my brand on social, or should I.
Udi Ledergor: Absolutely. You, you do need to think about differentiation. If you wanna stand out, and if you don’t wanna stand out, then why bother being on social media or, or anywhere else? I think it’s important to understand, I. And, and this is like potentially a long answer, so I’ll kind of just give some pointers of what to consider.
And it’s probably beyond the scope of our talk today to really break it down. But you need to understand what category you’re operating in. Is that category clear to your aUdience? How mature is it? And what is your place in that, in that category? So I’ll tell you a story in 1947, an exhausted copywriter by the name of Francis Garrity went to bed and before shutting her eyes, she mumbled a little prayer. She said, God, send me a line. And then she scribbled something on a piece of paper and fell asleep. She woke up in the morning.
She found that she had written down the words, A diamond is forever. And can you guess who her client was?
Sophie Bounassisi: You bet De Beers.
Udi Ledergor: Yeah, she was working for a WA, the Pennsylvania based, ad agency. And their client was the beers. And the beers had a problem. They had a huge stockpile of diamonds and not enough people buying diamonds. They knew that if they released that stockpile, the diamond prices would fall.
And so they went to their ad agency and said, Hey, we need a campaign to increase the demand for diamonds artificially, because they’re not that rare. Sorry, spoiler here. They’re not that rare. But we need more people to think that they are and want to buy them for all these special occasions. So can you help us?
And so Francis Garrity came up with the line diamonds forever. Decades later just a few weeks before her death at age 83, that slogan was chosen by advertising age magazine as the slogan of the century. So it was very, very impactful. And of course, we all know today the very common practice of clueless grooms going and spending two months worth of salary on buying a diamond engagement ring.
And that is a direct result of that campaign. You know, before that campaign came out, what percentage of engagement rings had a diamond in them? 10%, 10%, 15 years later, 80%, 80% of Diamond engaging rings had a diamond in them. And that is the impact of category creation. And I go into that story and my entire thoughts on category creation and how we did it and how we measured it at Gong.
But I’ll link this back to, to your story on, on differentiation. So if you are building a category, this is the point I wanna make. You can focus on the category attributes that are very basic because most people don’t understand them yet. And here’s an example. So the two examples are one from the beers.
In their first ads, they just said a diamond is forever. They did not even include their logo on it. It was just a diamond in forever. And why could they do that? Because they knew they owned 80% of the world’s stockpile of diamonds. So if you or your fiance went into a store and bought a diamond. They knew that eight out of 10 diamonds would come from their inventory.
So they didn’t, they didn’t care about advertising their brand. They cared about creating a category, and it turns out it’s easier to get a large group of people. Buyer’s market to agree on a problem and a common solution without shoving a specific brand in their face. And so they did that exceptionally well by causing lots of people to now associate diamonds with engagement and commitment and love, and Valentine’s Day and Christmas and anniversaries and all that.
It all started from the Francis Garrity campaign and they were very modest about using their brand name in those early campaigns. Let’s transition back to SaaS. That’s exactly what Gong did in 2019 when we launched the revenue intelligence category to the best of our estimates, we owned about 80% of the revenue intelligence category.
And so we decided for the next two years to focus most of our marketing on the category, explaining why gut-based decisions on revenue are not a great idea. And so we came out with a slogan, maybe not as fantastic as a diamond in forever, but we. Goodbye opinions. Hello reality. And that was the front of our category messaging for two years.
And only in this fine print could you find revenue intelligence by gong. So we made gong the steward of the category versus trying to differentiate too hard because people were new to the category. And so that’s an example of what I meant by you need to understand. The maturity of your category, how much people know about the category, and then what is your place within it.
If you’re leading and creating, by all means, put that at the forefront. If you’re an up and comer or if you’re disrupting a category, make that the message. If you provide 80% of the features that have a price, then that should be your differentiation. What we knew for sure is that so few people understood what revenue intelligence could do for them.
That getting into the back in 2019, that getting into the nuances of how our product is better in very specific ways than some of the alternatives that would be shooting ourselves in the foot because people just didn’t understand the basics of why do I even need to record my customer conversations.
So that’s what we led with. While other competitors were focusing on some very, minute bell and whistle that they had, and nobody understood the broader picture of, why do I even need a product like this? I don’t care that yours can do that, but why do I even need the product? And so that’s why there’s no easy answer to differentiation, but it really depends on where you are in the category life cycle.
Sophie Bounassisi: Incredible.
Udi Ledergor: I love it. Those are fantastic examples. And one of my favorite parts of the DeBeers example is, when the reporter was doing research on Francis Garrity, they went to her house and ended up finding her notebooks and, and notes around the marketing.
And the brain behind it and in the notes was some people are going to start catching on around the marketing side of diamonds. So make them feel different by selling them sapphires and diamonds combined. And the reporter that was looking into Francis Garrity, surely enough, looked down at her finger and said, oh my gosh, that’s exactly what I have on.
So.
and action.
Sophie Bounassisi: Super clever. I’m gonna sneak one more very, very tactical question in Udi, and that is around LinkedIn company pages for founders that are running marketing, often taking a founder-led marketing approach, when they are building out their company presence and their own presence
What’s your perspective on the balance between the company page and the founder? Should the company be taking its own identity or should the company page live under the founder and more so be a resharing distribution center, especially at that early stage where there may not be a marketing team built out, like you brought in someone for social.
Udi Ledergor: So, so there are a few almost absolute truths there, but, but there are also, some areas where there’s, there’s wiggle room and a few ways to get it right. So here, let’s start with some kind of the truth. People are far more likely to respond and follow and engage with a human profile than they are with a company profile.
That’s just our nature. When was the last time you stopped and argued with a billboard? You, you don’t, you argue with people, and it’s the same on social media, like you’re not gonna argue with a billboard. If someone says something annoying and you wanna call them out and you wanna argue about it, you want it to be a human and you’re more likely to do that with a human.
I’m giving the negative example because. We all like a good fight, but even if they said something very agreeable, you’re more likely to share it and give them credit and also take some for yourself by agreeing with this great smart person. If it’s a person, it’s very unlikely that you’ll do this with something that a corporate page published.
We just, we we’re, we don’t operate that way, so that’s something to keep in mind. Now, what that tells us is a couple of things. It tells us we absolutely need to cultivate human profiles now. I know that founder led marketing is kind of a big thing and a trend, and a lot of founders say, oh, I don’t have time for that, and then they get ghost writers.
And I think there’s valid ways of doing that. I think one thing you can learn from the gong example is that it doesn’t have to be the founders. Neither of our founders is very active on social media and folks like Chris Orloff and Devin Reed build huge following during their time on gongs. Content team.
They were not very senior in the organization at all. Like both of them made it up to director level, not beyond that. In, in the marketing org. I think Chris was senior director at some point. so that is proof that you can create a face of a company with someone who’s not the co-founder and is not even the executive.
I think they both have more followers than I do, and I was their CMO, right? And so that’s one thing to keep in mind. Now, having said that, and I’m, I’m if, if we were with a live aUdience, I’m sure I’d get the question, but what do you do if they leave the company? Okay. So that is one of the reasons why you do need to balance out and find creative ways of getting some of the folks who follow your top employees to also follow the brand page because you do want to grow that following because there’s gonna be stuff you’re gonna wanna do on that company page.
And as the company grows, maybe the influence of a single person in the company is less than it was when you were a small team. And some people do move out less likely with founders, but even they sometimes move out. So you do want to build a following for the company page. And, and we’ve, we’ve played that game at Gong and at the same time growing followers of our best people, we were also growing the followers of the company page.
I think we crossed 300,000 followers or something like that on the Gong Company page, which shows you that you can build a following on a corporate page. It’s gonna be in lockstep with the people and they’re gonna cross reference each other’s posts. Like maybe Devon is sharing a post from Gong. And that causes people who already follow Devon to want to, to follow the Gong page.
And we also, make the gong page as human as we can. That means that it’s not all deadly serious. It’s not all about product awards and releases. It’s also some, Steam letting out on, on sales memes and jokes and, and rowry at the time, and all this stuff that, that makes it feel like, oh, this is a logo, but it’s still fun and they’re posting good edutainment.
I wanna be educated by Gong Labs content. I wanna be entertained by them. Memes on, at the end of quarter, and this is a page I’m going to follow. So people do follow pages and you’ve gotta create that right interaction and personify them so that they are fun to hang out with.
Sophie Bounassisi: Great advice and Udi, really appreciate your time. You know, we dug into four different reasons why marketing fails. What else can people expect from your book?
Udi Ledergor: Well, the book does cover pretty much all the main tactical areas, maybe minus product marketing, which I only cover in the aspect of category creation. So if you wanna know how to make your brand look two years ahead of where it really is, there’s a whole chapter called Punch Above Your Weight that talks about why the easiest way to market.
Branding projects fail by letting marketing own the brand. And I, I make hopefully a solid argument for why marketing cannot own the brand. Go read it if you wanna find out who does. I talk about content and events and categories and, and I do share quite a few failure stories. I don’t want anyone to think that everything I touched turned to gold.
That was far from being true, and I think there’s something to learn from every failure story. And then the last third of the book is really about exciting stuff that we sampled here today. We didn’t get a chance to get into how to navigate your own career as a marketer, how to create your dream roles and go from one role to another, highlighting your, your, your best work.
We did talk a little bit about creating a courageous team. So there’s more on that there. And then the final chapter, which I think is super interesting and often, often overlooked. The only way to succeed in marketing is if sales is successful. And so that chapter touches, sales and marketing alignment.
I break it down into a point framework that I co-wrote with gong’s longtime CRO, Ryan Longfield and a dear friend, and I think that’s gonna be helpful for anyone who’s not sure how to approach. Sales, marketing, alignment and practice. ’cause we all know it’s a good idea, but not everyone can explain and articulate exactly how to get that right.
So the book is available now on Amazon, on Barnes and Nobles, wherever books are sold. I’d love for folks to go get them and then connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me what you thought about it.
Sophie Bounassisi: Amazing. No shortage of insight in that book, that’s for sure. We will drop it into the show notes along with your LinkedIn profile. For our listeners, feel free to connect with Udi, check out the book. We appreciate you hanging out with us as always, and Udi a huge thank you to yourself, you know, for everything that you do across GTM fund, GTM, now, and now, the greater kind of marketing ecosystem too.
It’s a fantastic book. Can’t wait to get in the hands of even more people.
Udi Ledergor: Thank you so much, Sophie. Thank you. And Max and Paul and Scott and the entire team, love working with you. And , thank you to the listeners for hanging out this long with us.
Sophie Bounassisi: You bet. All right. Thank you everyone. We will see you next week.
